


Cure for Sting of Wasp or Bee

by scioscribe



Category: Mary Reilly - All Media Types, Mary Reilly - Valerie Martin
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene, Unresolved Moral Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:42:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21735472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Mary resorts to odd scraps of paper to document a rather odd occurrence.
Relationships: Henry Jekyll/Mary Reilly
Comments: 5
Kudos: 19
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Cure for Sting of Wasp or Bee

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



> Victorian household details + title from the wonderful _Enquire Within Upon Everything_.

I have filled my last book and must write on whatever scrap of paper I can find. My recollections are shaped by what space I have for them, and it is like the envelope before me is a narrow slit of window and my only way to see my days.

There were things I omitted when my journal was bound in books, where the pages had to march on reliably. With scrap it is different. I could lose one of these pieces easily or else give it to the fire.

When I get my next half-day I mun go to Lett’s for another book. There seems a danger in being quite so free with my thoughts, but at the same time, I cannot go so many days without writing. All I have done lies undigested otherwise. So I have begged every spare bit of paper in the house, if it is to easily be hand, and Cook has given me an old newspaper she was saving to light the kitchen fires.

And now, even with my hand cramping from keeping each letter as small as possible, I have filled up a quarter of this envelope, half of one side. I will not run out of space, not when want I want to write, and perhaps destroy, is precious enough that I want clean white paper for it and not newsprint.

I was in our garden cutting some sprigs of lavender to be bagged along with thyme and put in among the linens, and Master passed by. That he should stop to talk to me when he goes between the house and his laboratory is not uncommon, but I try to guard myself against expecting it—that I might not risk disappointment but might, if he does stop, be freshly pleased each time.

“Good morning, Mary,” he said. “Do you trim that plant for beauty or healthfulness?”

“It is properly somewhere between the two, sir,” I said. “It goes in with the linen, to keep it fragrant and ward off the insects that do sometimes get at it where it’s stored.”

“So the first use is beauty and the second the health of our linen. And you said that is—”

“Lavender, sir.” I held up a bit for him to examine.

“It is somewhat like the digitalis,” he said, with an appeal to the plant that he did know, that being, as he’d told me, the medical name for foxglove.

It seemed to me that there was a world of difference between the two, from shade to shape of bloom, but as it was more like the foxglove than the lovage or angelica growing near it, I said, “Yes, sir,” and only thought it good that he knew the foxglove at first sight, should he ever need it for medicine, for it wouldn’t do to give someone lavender under the same circumstances.

“The angelica is in fine bloom, Mary,” he said, and I heard a kind of hopefulness in his voice, as if he wished me to notice he remembered I had shown it to him.

I am at the end, but if I stop here, it is all innocent and untroubled, nothing I could not have committed to my book. But I will have to wait until I have more good paper.

* * *

This is to go second in sequence with the envelope from before, which I have been leaving pinned to the inside of my shift. I think this one in concert with it can still be pinned there without the weight causing the cloth to tear. And now I will try to make good use of my space.

It was like sun coming out to shine on only me, that Master had some care for what I thought of him, and that he’d taken special note of what I’d said to him before about the flowers, and I felt my face warm so much it was like my cheeks would blister from it.

“Yes, sir,” I said, “it is coming up almost as well as the weeds. Most that is so pretty does not have the same good luck or hardiness.”

“And you, Mary?” he said quietly.

I could feel my scars climbing up me like ivy. I began to say that I was hardy enough, I hoped, but I remembered the way Master had touched those marks, being so delicate with them as if, red and white as they were, he could have mistaken them for flowers themselves. And he had called me fair on that one day, when he’d asked if I ever wished for another’s life. I thought, I do not want, then, to say I am not pretty, because then he must either take that in silence, which would set a kind of crack running straight through me, or deny it, which compliment, being all but begged out of him, could not help but lessen the first, which had come without any warning.

And I believe my looks are hard to put words to, for women who are written about do not often have bodies such as mine, with rough-hewn hands and solid legs and arms heavy and strong as teak. Of the two of us, Master is the one who could well have been carved from soapstone instead. He is so fine in construction, and oftentimes so fragile, that even when spooning broth to his lips I have worried I would bruise them. And we were not far, then, from where his ankle, with its white skin and mild blue vein, had lain upon my lap.

I did not know how to answer, then, about myself, so I said only, “If you would like it, sir, I could gather some,” meaning the angelica, “to brighten your rooms.”

He said yes, allowing me my privacy on the other question, but as I moved to cut some of the brightest flowers for him, a wasp lit upon my wrist. I had shaken it out of its place, and the creature’s mind, such as it was, was stirred to revenge—it thrust its stinger home.

“Mary!” Master said, coming to shoo it away.

His cry had done more for me than my own would have, as if he had shouted with my own voice. He held my hand in his, the first he’d done so since looking at the scars there, and I felt as if I would go on letting the poor stiff and reddened things be maimed, for all they were my own body, if that would always bring his attention.

“It has not left its stinger,” he said.

“It were a wasp, sir, not a bee,” I said, “and they don’t.”

“A shame,” he said, “for I know the bees pull themselves apart after the sting, and then, Mary, you would have had the last laugh. A wasp’s stinger is smooth, so that he pulls it in and out like a knife.”

I had not known that, but hearing it took me back to Soho and Mrs. Farraday’s, so that I thought I would not for all the rest of my life hear Mr. Hyde’s name without the sound of it being shaped by the buzz of wasps, for there was a man whose way had been smoothed so he could have his escape. A wasp is free of consequences in that same way, and I had answered Master wrongly on that subject, once, as I had been thinking only of men and women, and not such other creatures as might be in the world.

Compared to the bloodied room and the sodden handkerchief, the slight swelling on my wrist was nothing, but I had no will to pull away from how Master held me.

I have no room again, for I have no omitted enough: I seem to need each word shaped for its own sake, with no regard for my paper. I must remember.

* * *

I am down to newspaper, now, which I had sworn I would not resort to for this account, as it concerns Master too much to be suited to written ’cross such cheap smudged print. The ink is on my hands already, just as black as coal. The butcher will not buy this weekly from us, used, no matter how clean we’ve kept it, because it always runs this way. Once it is refuse it is good only for the fire.

So what I have begun on clean paper, however small and loose, I will end here, in dirtiness that will wind up in the grate.

I could not wait any longer, however, and it may be for the best. Now I can admit that that this account must be disposed of.

Master was clasping my hand in his. “Poor Mary! It is already inflamed.”

“I can get some bluing for it, sir,” I said, but I saw at once that he did not know what I meant. He had never needed the workings of his own laundry explained to him before, of course, so he did not know about the blue-bag we had on hand. I started to explain what it was kept for and that I had heard it could ease this kind of pain, but Master seemed appalled by the idea I would seek treatment in a laundry.

“No, Mary,” he said decisively. “Do me the honor, please, of being my first patient since I was trained—that is not reassuring, I know, but I believe a sting is simple enough.”

It was not in me to refuse him, and so I followed him through the theater and into his laboratory. With each door that closed between us and the others of the house, I felt a far sweeter pain, and in truth I wished then that I had been stung elsewhere. For perhaps he would have been equally insistent on treating me if that were so.

I had not been in his laboratory for some time, and I saw with dismay that the brass babies of the grate had suffered unusual neglect.

Master saw the direction of my gaze, but it was clear he did not understand, for he said, “Are you chilled?” and there was a trace of impatience in his voice.

“No, sir,” I said hastily. I would never have him go to his knees to start a fire for my sake—the thought of it was intolerable to me—and he was, besides, doing so much already. And of the two of us, I was not the one who required such close rooms and stifling heat. “I was only looking at the babies. They need polishing.”

Master smiled. “I have let them grow too dim, it’s true.” He relinquished my hand—which dropped at once to my side like something clubbed down dead—and gathered up a vial of ammonia. We use it to clean brass, and at first I thought he was truly going to kneel down there and shine the grate to please me.

I don’t understand even now why, but while I’d had no wish to see him start a fire for me, I was entirely captured by this new idea and felt as if every stay I had had been tugged punishingly tight and I was being held there among all my laces. I have thought it over every night since, and that feeling of embrace has always come back to me.

But all he meant was to apply a few drops of ammonia to a small square of linen. He held it to the puncture mark on my wrist.

“This should take the pain away,” Master said.

I did not tell him that the bluing would have done the same, or a slice of onion—and that we had nearly the same vial of ammonia in Mr. Poole’s closet.

He was cradling my hand in his own smooth ones. And I thought, I am rough, and if I do wrong here, I will pull myself apart.

We smelt of ammonia and lavender, the both of us, and after a moment, Master said, “I asked you once, Mary, if you were ever afraid of yourself.” There was a strange light in his eyes, bright as the sun on my pruning shears had been. “You answered yes.”

I could only repeat the word in a whisper.

“I have been testing the limits of that fear,” he said. “Suppose—suppose it can be excised from us, without spilling so much as a drop of our blood. A chemical operation that is no different, in essence, from what I am doing right now. Shouldn’t something be done about the poison within us?”

Was it poison I felt or only foolishness? “What could be done about it?”

He had not let me go. He was looking at me most intently, and it seemed he was bitterly unhappy. “I cannot lose your good opinion, Mary.”

“You will not, sir,” I answered without hesitation.

His next demand was sudden: “Did your mother drink with your father?”

The past blew through like a chill, damp wind, turning everything clammy. I wasn’t thinking of my stays any longer—only of wasps and bees now. “Sometimes she did, sir.”

“Then perhaps…” He turned away from me. He reached into his desk and, with a single unerring move, took from it a vial that, as he’d said, looked no different in kind from his ammonia. He did not meet my eyes. “We could drink together.”

But that was the pattern I least wanted to follow. How could he, with all he knew, not see that? That my marm had sometimes shared a bottle with my father meant nothing but that she’d sometimes shared the headache the next morning too. I don’t think the memories of those few nights are any comfort to her as she is bent over her piecework, poor Marm—nor the lost money, spent health, and hurt pride. And how could following my father further down into ruin have given any of it back to her?

I felt he would press the vial to my lips and the glass would sear me. I took a step back.

Master froze in place, his hand extended. “No. No, I cannot do it. _I_ cannot do it.” He thrust the bottle back among its fellows and gave me a thin and ghostly smile. “You will not drink,” he said, as slowly as if he were feeling out a riddle, “and _I_ have no wish to make you.” All at once he collapsed into his chair and gripped the edge of his desk until his knuckles whitened.

“Sir?”

“Go.” His voice was like some desperate whip-crack. “If you put the angelica here, I will only forget to see to it. Go gather your lavender.”

I didn’t know what spirit he had in his vial, but in that moment, I would almost have gulped it down, if it would have pleased him and made him recall me. But I couldn’t disobey him. I hurried back out into the garden, my eyes burning. The sprigs of lavender in my basket on the ground might have been trimmed by some Druid from some other century, for all I felt for them.

I know what it is, yes, to be afraid of myself and what I might say or might do. I might have drunk what he had tried to hand me, and to even think of it feels like stepping backwards into my own shadow. How could I have ever come out of it again, knowing I’d been blackened right before his eyes?

I must burn these papers now. Writing it all down has cut the memories out of me, all in line with Master’s own experiments, and I hope that by the time I can no longer see the mark on my wrist, all that troubles me of that hour will have faded away. And I will be spared this fruitless guessing of what might have become of us.


End file.
